Charles L. Gilliland

Charles Leon Gilliland was still a teenager when he left the Ozarks for the Army. Born near Mountain Home, Arkansas, in 1933, he was a private first class in Company I, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, when Chinese forces opened the spring offensive toward Seoul in late April 1951.

On April 24–25 his battalion's sector along Route 33 fractured under attack. Isolated units were ordered south; the road was already cut in places, and the withdrawal became a running fight through roadblocks. The Medal of Honor citation records that Gilliland volunteered to stay on a firing position covering the company's movement, refused evacuation after being wounded, and kept firing until he was killed by enemy small-arms fire. His body was left where he fell when the company had to pull back. Later searches after United Nations forces regained the ground did not find him.

DPAA's public profile (a0Jt000000yz8SoEAI) lists him Unaccounted For, analytical category Active Pursuit — meaning the agency still treats recovery as an open investigative track. He was posthumously promoted to corporal and is on the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu and on the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall. An administrative finding of death is not a recovered grave. This register lists a seventeen-year-old Arkansas rifleman because the file is still open, not because a citation needs decorating.